FPGAs or GPUs?

[Ghost]

Hello Denarius Community!

We are looking to get votes and opinions on the recent development with FPGA miners on our network (Field Programmable Gate Arrays, e.g. Specialized hardware to mine our PoW Tribus algorithm). We are looking to get votes to help determine what route Denarius will take in keeping our current Tribus PoW algorithm or if we should move forward and fork away from it to a new unreleased PoW algorithm, forcing FPGAs off the network. Our PoW mining will only last for one more year roughly, so please think hard about your vote and take your time, feel free to discuss your opinion with the rest of the community below.

Please vote in the poll above and\or post your reasoning behind your vote here!

[hossagno]

Keep it GPU only, keeps the coin open for a wide audience rather than a select few who have this technology adopted already.

Edited April 5, 2019 by hossagno

[weaponizedautismbux]

Forking will give us some publicity. We need publicity

[Julius]

I never heard of this Denarius until I had the chance to mine it on a little FPGA. 

[hossagno]

3 minutes ago, Julius said:

I never heard of this Denarius until I had the chance to mine it on a little FPGA. 

So? Glad you found out about Denarius welcome, but if this poll goes in favor of GPU's as Denarius already is ASIC resistant (so why not to FPGA) you can use your toys on other coins to ruin average Joe miners' income. This coin doesn't need powerfull machinery to keep the chain secure and stable, we got FS and POS to take care of that. If its the next best thing in mining so be it, other coins can decide whether to go that way or not. This coin only has a small POW lifespan of about 3 years of which FPGA will come close to mining 2 years in total if we don't ban them now. Decentralization is key, without making it FPGA proof we let many coins go to fewer people, rather than when it's GPU only lot's of different miners small and big are able to extract a fair share rather than picking up leftovers.

[Mica]

Well lets see:

FPGA I don't have, don't plan on getting one, if we keep going FPGA this just becomes one of those altcoins for another year(or 2) that will be classified as an "fpga only coin" and i'll slowly ignore it.

So basicly my vote goes to GPU, this was a GPU coin when I got arround in Denarius and hope it stays like that.

Sad part is FPGA ppl already running on the network and collecting their D, giving a slight disadvantage over GPU miners but oh well you win and lose some.

[Vagumera]

There's a reason why other coins have changed their Algo to be more 'resistant' to ASIC miners.  It's recognised that miners dumping large volumes of coin on the exchanges does nothing to help the coin. All it does is destroys the price.  The same goes for FPGA, in fact any type of miner (ASIC, FPGA, etc) that destroys mining for the average person/Hodler.  If FPGA miners were HODLers then probably not so much an issue. But this hasn't been the case. If FPGA miners are allowed to multiply cheaply then they could easily push D price down to the low hundreds, which is not good for any Denarius Enthusiast or HODLer.  I think 'organic' growth from average person/gpu mining will allow for a gradual growth of Denarius. 

[tomas276]

Please keep it in Tribus - FPGAs aren't enemy as ASICS.

[steel]

5 hours ago, tomas276 said:

Please keep it in Tribus - FPGAs aren't enemy as ASICS.

ditto

[nfsden]

Hash algo change  won't help with lack of buying support and interest to D.

The problem in a weak trading volume. 
This isn't miners or algorithm issue. Just lack of interest

Also D POW phase ends within 12 months or so.

 

[hossagno]

All I see for votes PRO FPGA are freshly made accounts, sent here to vote because someone from FPGA community asked them to do so. Seems that the twitter vote being askewed by 63-37% wasn't already telling enough. The entire Denarius discord, even those who own FPGA's are against the idea of keeping FPGA's on Tribus. They don't see additional value in keeping them on, for those FPGA guys coming it here telling it's lacking trade volume and they are no threat? I've been in your Discord yesterday, you guys want to achieve 200k Denarius in a matter of months, the total supply will never exceed 10 million coins. Yet us GPU miners know how slow Denerius trickles in when it's mined en masse with even just GPU's only. We weren't waiting for you coinhoggers to claim almost 80% of daily POW rewards. I've seen yesterday dat alot from your community doen't even know what Denarius features are, you were wondering if it was a long term or short term hold now when the debate was openened about changing the algo to GPU only. Some of you still had to look up it's features, I mean? You guys cry about a coin you know jack shit about but the profit you might lose that is your only interest. Yet we as the Denarius community don't want you to mine it, that is the main sentiment from nearly all members in Discord, yet you guys take the lead in votes. Why is that? Cuz you already asked the entire FPGA community to vote on the twitter poll and they are not slowly being sent in here to do the same. Member it's a community vote, the ones who don't want this are more vocal than those who are PRO FPGA, cuz let's face it, those voting here pro FPGA only found out yesterday that Denarius has a masternode stystem (FS) or POS, or POW ending in about 1.25kk blocks? And they didn't even know they were talking to Carsen (the dev) before he popped a vain.

So, the people who are less invested in it emotionally or connected to the brand and the coin itself, are the ones who are pulling this vote towards them. Claiming they will dump the coin when we change the algo because they say it becomes worthless if THEY can not mine it. Tell me how does it become worthless when all the suddon it's no longer being mined by a select few but is being mined by the masses, giving a broader audience to reach with GPU only mining and avoiding centralizing our coin supply in the hands of a few who are either willing ot obtain 200k (0.2% of max supply) until they can dump it for profit or those who just dump it immediatly after they mine it. Open up your eyes, pull those dollar signs out of your sight and face it, FPGA people are NOT interested in the wellbeing of Denarius only thing tha matter is their own wallet.

But hey, make some more newbie accounts, copy paste some messages from eachother and nothing happened right? We'll see, we'll see!

[haha]

i find the blackminer f1 support tribus for more than one year，no big impact to the price of D coin. They have many algo to choose and little people mine D coin. So the issue is little people interested in D instead of fpga could mine.

[manosv]

4 minutes ago, haha said:

i find the blackminer f1 support tribus for more than one year，no big impact to the price of D coin. They have many algo to choose and little people mine D coin. So the issue is little people interested in D instead of fpga could mine.

no big impact ? look at the fall of the pric during last year LMAO

[Colt Glass]

If the mining ends in a year anyway, why dump all that time and money/energy into forking? cpu->gpu->fpga->asic is the natural progression of a good pow coin. let the miners support the chain. have a free market mentality about the mining infrastructure imo

[Colt Glass]

15 hours ago, manosv said:

no big impact ? look at the fall of the pric during last year LMAO

u can say that about any coin over the last year.

[Journeyman1181]

Don't want it to be known as a pump and dumps...

[pondwater]

i have stopped mining the coin due to amount of coins i was getting then from where i was, if we can get to the point of making it gpu only i would consider mining again, but getting very little coins for the energy spent it is not worth it to me atm

Edited April 7, 2019 by pondwater

[xover]

with electricity rate higher than ~$0.1 nowadays GPU mining on almost all altcoins is pointless

[Ragtag]

Make GPU great again!

[whitefire990]

I was asked to chime in on this topic-- keep in mind that as an FPGA developer I am biased, but I will try to create an unbiased suggestion.  Firstly, as xover said above, with $0.10 electrical, GPU mining is not profitable at home anymore (at least not 'worth' the trouble for most people).  I was a GPU miner (46 cards), I sold them all because my electrical is $0.10.  Huge centralized GPU farms have very low electrical rates, and for them, GPU's are very profitable.  So, in my mind, 'supporting' GPU mining means you are really just supporting huge centralized GPU farms, which are the only places where GPU mining is really profitable.  FPGA mining is profitable at home, with any electrical rate.  Anyone can buy a $179 Blackminer F1 Mini FPGA to mine Denarius with the current Tribus algorithm, and the power consumption is only 50 watts.   To use an example similar to Denarius, the Verus coin team were not happy when the Blackminer guys released a bitstream to mine Verus coin, so the Verus team 'forked' to 'kick' the FPGA's off their network, and within 3 weeks, the Blackminer team reprogrammed their FPGA's and release a new public bitstream to mine the 'new' Verus algorithm and now F1 owners are mining Verus again-- a huge waste of time by the Verus team, doing a complex and risky hard-fork for no gain whatsoever.  Denarius team can do whatever they want with their project, but I repeat that doing anything to try to 'support' GPU mining is just supporting huge centralized GPU farms, and 'forking' to 'kick' FPGA's off the network will keep them off for maybe 2-3 weeks at best.  If you truly want FPGA's off the network, you have only two choices of algorithms, ProgPOW and Ethash, which are the only two algorithms that FPGA's cannot mine well at all; but if you choose those algorithms you are choosing to support huge centralized GPU farms which are the only places that can mine with GPU's at any decent profit.  Choose wisely!

[Vagumera]

This has been a very interesting discussion and some great points made.

The points brought up by whitefire990 are very good, and the I personally stopped mining Denarius using my GPU due to power costs. I mined about 20 D and had to pay an extra $250 in power bill for the quarter. So unless you have cheap power then D would only get mined as whitefire990 says in some mining GPU farm. I feel due to power that it is out of reach for a lot of people. So maybe FPGA should be allowed to continue.

As others have said the POW will end soon-ish in another year and a bit.  The question is, can D survive non-hodler FPGA miners dumping on the exchanges?

 

[Vagumera]

Also, we need to keep in mind the 'dangers' of hard forking.  Remember what happened last time D was forked a few months ago? It was a bit of a mess and D price more than halved and never really recovered in price.  It took a while for the Denarius Blockchain to get sorted out.

If D is hard forked then remember Testing, Testing, Testing...you can't do too much testing and Code/peer reviews. Nearly every modern software development shop now have Peer code reviews and separate QA testing. I've been doing this at work in software development for the last 5 years. At first I was apprehensive but it's proven to me to be invaluable.

[tardis1]

Just to finish whitefire's thoughts -- the large gpu farms are no more holders then -- as some assert the Fpga miners are -- I beg to differ but not going to spend hours arguing that one again.  So if you want to build a solid network learn from verus, which eventually ended up embracing all forms of mining, or go POS/MN early. Personally, I would go the second route.  I too have a smaller gpu farm -- I would not mine D with it as there are more interesting coins for me to mine.  I don't actually mine D anymore with the blackminer and won't likely going forward.  But there are others that can help this coin going forward.  Your decision, but as whitefire says choose wisely.  Btw I have a ton of respect for what versus ended up doing and the path forward they chose, it is a coin I actively mine. 

[whitefire990]

Another example is LUXcoin; they used the Phi1612 algorithm; FPGA's came on their network, so they tried to fork to a 'new' FPGA resistant algorithm called Phi2.  The hard fork was a disaster, the blockchain stopped for 3+ weeks, price tanked, daily volume went to almost nothing.  The price and volume never recovered.  When they came back online with Phi2, the Blackminer team just reprogrammed their FPGA's and then launched a public Phi2 bitstream and once again FPGA's are on the LUXcoin network, but the hard fork basically killed the coin.  So you might ask, was the hard fork worth it for them...?

[buzzkillb]

24 minutes ago, whitefire990 said:

Another example is LUXcoin; they used the Phi1612 algorithm; FPGA's came on their network, so they tried to fork to a 'new' FPGA resistant algorithm called Phi2.  The hard fork was a disaster, the blockchain stopped for 3+ weeks, price tanked, daily volume went to almost nothing.  The price and volume never recovered.  When they came back online with Phi2, the Blackminer team just reprogrammed their FPGA's and then launched a public Phi2 bitstream and once again FPGA's are on the LUXcoin network, but the hard fork basically killed the coin.  So you might ask, was the hard fork worth it for them...?

This is a really good point, and a concern on any unnecessary hard forking.

I am still looking at Denarius as a Litecoin competitor and the top coins haven't changed their algos, even when LTC said scrypt was Asic resistant. A similar discussion from 2013. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=225620.0

Denarius also has a mechanism using Proof of Stake that can work to take over POW hashrate, which I haven't really seen anyone use to their advantage in this debate.